I write and talk about this a lot, but for this month I’ll look back at DevOps for me in 2001.

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2001, A DBA’s Journey

I started working for a small startup in 2001. I was the DBA (dev and production) with 4-5 developers. Eventually we grew to 10 developers, a couple QA people, and a UX person. Our goal was to release code every Wednesday night, and developers would work from Tues-Mon am on that week’s changes.

The initial plan when I started was to get together with the lead dev and produce the scripts to upgrade our web application as well as the database. Early on we had a small system, so it was a few hours on Monday afternoon putting together a script for the QA server. Inevitably we’d make changes if QA found issues, and then Wednesday night we’d go into the office and usually spend a few hours deploying and fixing things. Often we had another developer or two with us to ensure that we could get the changes out.

Over a few months we started to try and smooth our process. We talked about the issues, and started small. First with version control, Visual SourceSafe at that time. We’d get everyone to check in changes, which let us more easily determine what had changed that week.

We also talked about what made life easier for the lead dev and me. How could we package code to easily ensure it gets deployed. For the database, this meant ensuring all files were named easily and branched to a folder.

Ultimately, the technical challenges were few. A few scripts that automatically packaged changes for us and deployed them. However, the biggest challenge was cultural. Getting all the developers to think forward about what was needed to get code to production and slightly alter their behavior. We also had to break habits of “fixing” code in QA. We had to learn to reset QA, change our scripts in version control, and then redeploy.

Sharing information, communicating, and adhering to a consistent process for deployments, ensuring that we practiced our production deployment on QA, helped us move to a release process that consisted of a phone call and a few minutes instead of a late night at the office.

DevOps works, but you have to work at building a process for your environment.